An Indian tea plantation owner and his wife were burned alive after their bungalow was attacked by up to 1,000 workers following a labour dispute.

The mob, which police said was dominated by women and children, later told police their employers had deserved to die and dared officers to arrest them.

The situation remained volatile on Thursday night, police said, and their first priority was to reestablish order around Tulapathar Tea Estate, in Tinsukia district in Assam.

The charred bodies of owner Mridul Kumar Bhattacharyya and his wife Rita were found on Wednesday afternoon.

Workers outside the estate openly told police and television crews that they had killed the owners because they had suffered cruelty and abuse at their hands.

"We all came and attacked the bungalow and set it on fire. They deserved to be killed as the planter has exploited us for a long time and tortured us for petty things," a tea estate female worker said on News Live local TV channel.

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The owners and staff had been locked in a dispute after several families were dismissed and ordered to leave their homes on the estate.

The labourers, many of them armed with traditional tribal weapons, including bows and arrows, spears and stones, initially prevented police from inspecting the scene.

They later found one body entirely reduced to ashes, and another, believed to be the owner's wife in the kitchen, charred beyond recognition.

Police superintendent P.P Singh said the workers had accused the owners of mistreating female workers and stealing the plot of their local church in the district, 300 miles east of Guwahati.

"The labourers held a lot of grudges against the owners for taking church land, being rude, especially to the women. But we cannot take this hanky-panky, it was a mob and they have openly set [the building] on fire. They said openly 'we've set fire to this house, in front of us. The majority of the mob are women and children – between 10 to 15 per cent of them were children between nine and fifteen," he said.

He said his detectives were hoping to identify the ringleaders within the next 24 hours but their first priority remains to restore order for the investigation to begin.

"We've brought the bodies for the post mortem and we're waiting for the exact cause of death ... We're looking at it from all angles," he added.

India's tea plantations have been blighted by bitter labour disputes, and several owners have been forced to abandon their estates in fear of attack by workers backed by rival political parties.

Some abandoned estates in West Bengal have seen high malnutrition rates and starvation deaths.